Eight down, forty-four to go.

Eight down, forty-four to go.

You Shall Know Our Velocity!
by Dave Eggers

Well, this isn't going very well, is it? I'd say I'm more than a wee bit behind. Part of that was due to the fact that I just couldn't give up my news / current event / culture magazine habit, so a lot of my reading time has been hijacked. And up until last weekend I was only about 100 pages into You Shall Know Our Velocity!, but a trip to the farm house in Michigan rectified that problem and allow me to speed through the rest of the book. It's amazing what some peace and quiet will do for your reading habits.

So, the book. I am not a member of the Dave Eggers cult. I do not worship at his altar. I have not ever been able to really get into his breakthrough, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, partially due to the fact that every time I open it my friend Julie's voice appears in my ear going on and on and on and on about how she went to high school with him. And Vince Vaughn. Who cares?

Moving on, it should be noted that the version of YSKOV! I read was the paperback version, complete with a middle section penned by someone other than the narrator, that calls the narrators accounting of the events into question. This is important.

At it's most basic, the tale is of two friends grieving a third and distributing money in exotic locales in an effort to deal with their loss and come to grips with human interplay on Earth. Once you cast that basic story into doubt, though, you unearth a story of one man's attempts to grapple with another death, or a character you long thought alive, and his lashings out at his best friend, but giving himself a beating whose blame can be laid at his traveling companion / best friend's feet.

I'll admit I probably would have been happier had Eggers not pulled the rug out from under me 2/3 of the way through the novel. But it would have been a happiness akin to that felt by folks that think New Order's "Love Vigilantes" is a tale of a man's reunion with his family.* Instead, the rug-pulling posits a whole slew of questions, creating turbulence in waters I thought I had already mastered. It was a bit of a parlor trick, but it was a well executed parlor trick.

I guess that's the way I feel about the whole book. Sometimes the story seems to be merely a contraption upon which to lay some of Egger's better sentences and metaphors. And other time the book just comes across as a rollicking adventure story. In the end I enjoyed both readings, so much so that I might even attempt a return to AHWOSG, despite Julie's phantom methods of driving me from those pages.

But first, I have a whole pile of other books to tackle as we race towards the end of the year.

*I will never forgive myself of robbing that reading of the song from Photogal. It was worse than telling a little kid there is no Easter Bunny / Santa Claus, because I was robbing her of a song that used to fill her with happiness and hope. Sometimes it's better to just keep your mouth shut.